Dr. Alissa Melinger

Lecturer

Visit the Speech and Gesture Production lab

Contact Details:
Telephone: (+44)(1382) 384610
Email: Alissa Melinger

Postal Address:
School of Psychology
The University of Dundee
Dundee
DD1 4HN
Scotland, UK

Biography

I am a graduate of the Department of Linguistics and the Center for Cognitive Science at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. My dissertation was an experimental study of the representation of morphological information in the mental lexicon. After completing my degree, I took up a three year post-doctoral position working with Willem Levelt, from the Production Group, and Sotaro Kita, in the Gesture Project, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. I also spent three years as a Post-doctoral researcher and lecturer in Psycholinguistics at Saarland University in Germany working with Matthew Crocker.

Research Grouping

Language, Cognition and Perception

Research

Language production (focusing both on lexical selection and sentence production)
Gesture production
Morphological processing

Research Topics

My research combines linguistic theory, psychological models, and experimental methodology into a line of research that investigates what speakers know about words. Specifically, I conduct research on the nature and organization of lexical representations, focusing more recently grammatical features in speech production (e.g., subcategorization frames, mass/count features, case features, etc) and the nature of different types of semantic relations (e.g., a comparison of effects arising from the relationship between dog and horse and the relationship between horse and saddle). I've developed novel variants of well-known experimental paradigms such as picture-word interference and syntactic priming to investigate lexical representations and processes. I developed a single word variant of traditional syntactic priming paradigms to investigate the mechanisms underlying word order priming effects. Rasha Abdel Rahman and I also developed a multiple word variant of picture-word interference paradigm to investigate the relationships between different types of distractor effects.

Publications


Links	Publications
	Janssen, N., Melinger, A., Mahon, B., Finkbeiner, M., & Caramazza, A. (2009). The word class effect in the picture-word interference paradigm. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. First published on: 07 December 2009 (iFirst)
link	Abdel Rahman, R., & Melinger, A. (2009). Semantic context effects in language production: A swinging lexical network proposal and a review. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24 (5), 713-734.
link	Abdel Rahman, R., & Melinger, A. (2009). Dismissing lexical competition does not make speaking any easier: A rejoinder to Mahon and Caramazza (2009). Language and Cognitive Processes, 24 (5), 749-760.
	Schulte im Walde, S. & Melinger, A. (2008). An in-depth look into the co-occurrence distribution of semantic associates. Journal of Italian Linguistics.Special Issue on From Context to Meaning: Distributional Models of the Lexicon in Linguistics and Cognitive Science.
	Abdel Rahman, R. & Melinger, A. (2008). Enhanced phonological facilitation and traces of concurrent word form activation in speech production: An object naming study with multiple distractors. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61, 1410-1440.
	Alario, F.-X., Ayora, P., Costa, A., & Melinger, A. (2008). Grammatical and Non-grammatical contributions to closed-class word selection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 34, 960-981.
	Melinger, A, Pechmann, T., & Pappert, S. (2008). Case in Language Production. In A. Malchukov, & A. Spencer (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Case; Oxford University Press.
	Schulte im Walde, S., Melinger, A., Roth, M., & Weber, A. (2008). An Empirical Characterisation of Response Types in German Association Norms. Research on Language and Computation, 6(2), 205-238.
	Abdel Rahman, R. & Melinger, A. (2007). When bees hamper the production of honey: Lexical interference from associates in speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 33(3), 604-614.
	Melinger, A. & Koenig, J.-P. (2007). Part-of-speech persistence: The influence of part-of-speech information on lexical processes.Journal of Memory and Language., 56, 472–489.
	Melinger, A. & Kita, S. (2007). Conceptual load triggers gesture production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 22 (4), 473-500.
	Melinger, A. & Dobel, C. (2005). Lexically-driven syntactic priming. Cognition, 98, B11-B20.
	Melinger, A. & Levelt, W. (2004). Gesture and the communicative intention of the speaker. Gesture, 4, 119-141.
	Melinger, A. & Abdel Rahman, R. (2004). Investigating the interplay between semantic and phonological distractor effects in picture naming. Brain and Language, 90, 213-220.
	Melinger, A. (2003). Morphological structure in the lexical representation of prefixed words: Evidence from speech errors. Language and Cognitive Processes. 18 (3), 335-362.
	Melinger, A. (2002). Foot Structure and Accent in Seneca. International Journal of American Linguistics, 68, 287-315.
	Mauner, G., Melinger, A., Koenig, J.-P., & Bienvenue, B. (2002) When is schematic participant information encoded: Evidence from eye-monitoring. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 386-406.
	Melinger, A. (2001) The contribution of semantic transparency to the morphological decomposition of prefixed words. Folia Linguistica, 3-4, 285-298.
	Melinger, A. &. Mauner, G. (1999). When are implicit agents encoded? Evidence from cross modal naming. Brain and Language, 68, 185 191.